At our university, our section had a grant of several old P4 computers. We decided on using them to create a 3x3 grid, which would function as a medium for our off-hand processing work. However, as of now, this is all we have done :

This is a video streaming running in 9 parts using vlc/ssh scripts to manage it.

As of now all the computers are connected to a single network, and managed using ssh key based authentication. I would love to hear some innovative ideas. Some hardware details are provided :

1gb RAM, Intel Pentium 4 2.4 GHz, 40GB HDD running Lucid

Particularly, I was thinking about the 40gb Portion being used as a cloud-based storage space for people. Something along the lines of sparkleshare or Owncloud but they don't seem to offer multiple computer based network. If there is someway to harness the computing ability of this grid, I would also like to hear about it.

5 Answers
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If the computers have a reasonable network connection, there are a number of services you can run to make the internet a better place. Few of the things I'm about to list are directly parallelizable across a cluster, but many of them work very well when used on a pool of machines with a DNS round-robin to load-balance and reduce the impact if any one of the machines goes down. In addition, you can perform maintenance on one machine at a time, while leaving the cluster and the services unaffected.

run a network time daemon and add it to the time server pool

run a GPG keyserver and add it to the keyservers pools

run a Tor bridge or relay, and mirror the Tor Project website

run a Mixmaster email mix server

run a Convergence or Perspectives notary to keep track of SSL irregularities

run a full instance of the SSL Observatory

run a Tahoe-LAFS node to participate in a secure, distributed filesystem

run an I2P or GNUnet node

The great thing is that most of these services aren't very processor-intensive, so they run really well even on older hardware. For these sorts of services, it's less important how much total processing-power you can contribute, and more important that there's a diverse set of machines involved. That's why I'm recommending them rather than contributing to one of the many @home projects:

for an older machine, you get a lot more make the world a better place with these sorts of services, than something which just wants all the CPU it can get.

Of course, with your leftover CPU time, you can still try to cure cancer or search the skies.

You may try mining some bitcoins. This virtual currency based on peer-to-peer protocol (and which can be easily exchanged for real money, at the moment of writing a bitcoin is worth about $11) has coins, which are generated not by a single institution, but by the network of all its users. The chances of having generated some amount of such money are the greater the more computing power you have. When you will have started, you can calculate if it will pay off.

You can add any BOINC supported project as per your wish. The most famous BOINC supported project is SETI@HOME, I think, but there are many other projects in fields like medicine as well. Here is a small list of projects: https://boinc.berkeley.edu/projects.php